PL/SQL New Features and Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g

Oracle 11g includes a substantial number of PL/SQL new features and enhancements. In order to prevent this article becoming too large some of these features have been split off into separate articles, but the following sections represent an explanation of the all the new features listed in the What's New in PL/SQL? section of the PL/SQL Language Reference manual.

The SIMPLE_INTEGER datatype is a subtype of the PLS_INTEGER datatype and can dramatically increase the speed of integer arithmetic in natively compiled code, but only shows marginal performance improvements in interpreted code. The following procedure compares the performance of the SIMPLE_INTEGER and PLS_INTEGER datatypes.

The speed improvements are a result of two fundamental differences between the two datatypes. First, SIMPLE_INTEGER and PLS_INTEGER have the same range (-2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647), but SIMPLE_INTEGER wraps round when it exceeds its bounds, rather than throwing an error like PLS_INTEGER.